


We Are Wanderers Still

by LittleLostStar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst and Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Lonely!Victor Nikiforov, M/M, POV Victor Nikiforov, Rating May Change, Yuuri has secrets, god was that not a tag already?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 22:38:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11496192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleLostStar/pseuds/LittleLostStar
Summary: Victor Nikiforov is a Writer, able to create books that summon whole worlds into existence. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that destroyed humanity across multiple dimensions, he wanders aimlessly through book after book and Age after Age, very possibly the last man in existence—until the day he returns to his library to find a message written by someone named Yuuri.Faced with the possibility of a companion after an indeterminably long time alone, Victor gives chase, following a series of increasingly cryptic notes and clues until he finds Yuuri. But as he delights in having someone to share his life with, Victor has no idea that Yuuri holds secrets of his own, nor that they have consequences that will ripple across the universe and either mend the cracks in reality—or destroy everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is _technically_ an AU for an old video game series called Myst, but I have written it in such a way that absolutely no prior knowledge is required in order to read this story. It takes place in that universe and makes liberal use of the concept of creating Ages, but doesn't conform to anything that happened in the canon.

_~_

 

> _What an astonishing thing a book is. ...Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic._
> 
> \- Carl Sagan

* * *

 

There are questions to which he will never know the answer, and on most days he can accept that.

 _How long has he been able to do this?_ It feels like forever. But he was young once, a child like any other, and could not even read or write English, never mind practice the Art. There was definitely a point when someone sat down and taught him the basics—how Writing worked, how Descriptive Books were different from Linking Books, the rules of grammar, and what it all could do.

 _How old is he?_ At some point he lost track. When your days are spent wandering an endless number of planets, each circling its own star (or two, or five, or occasionally a black hole), time becomes fluid, and the concept of birthdays mostly useless. But when he sits down at his familiar library desk to Write and he runs his fingers through his hair, he swears he can feel it thinning.

 _Is he the only one left?_ It’s entirely possible that he’s the last person alive across all worlds. He’s linked into dozens of established Ages, and written many more himself, but he’s never seen anyone else. He’s the only Writer, certainly. The Art and its masters were pretty much lost in the cataclysm, when the star fissure ripped a hole in space and time the same way you’d tear a piece of paper. Some civilizations fought to the last, men and women literally grabbing at the dirt for purchase to avoid the rift, all in vain. Others leapt willingly, holding children in their arms or clutching their lovers as they fell forever.

He dreams about it, sees the endless void of darkness shimmering with stars, feels himself fall, and snaps awake in a cold sweat. He can’t remember if he saw it with his own eyes or if he only read about it once, a very long time ago.

Some questions are older than he is, but no less existential: is Writing learned and acquired, or ingrained and merely discovered? Is it passed down through familial lines, or is it a mutation? Can anyone learn to do it, in the absence of the gatekeeping which always haunts the roles society fears and adores most?

He doesn’t have those answers, but he knows this:

He possesses a unique gift; it was once rare and revered, back when there were others who could help establish the concept of value, when identities and societies were forged by the comparative judgement that delineated _having_ versus _not having._ Now it is all he knows, all he wants to do, all he _can_ do.

With quill and ink, he can write a universe into being. With the press of his palm to the brightly coloured panel which appears at the front of these special books, he can fall into that universe, walk around in it, _live_ in it. The worlds can be almost anything imaginable; they can have violent magenta skies, sand dunes made of pulverized green glass, or rotate around a dark star that bathes your skin in an eerie moonlight-like glow as you wander through a forest of pitch-black plants. They can have technology based on steam or lava or a glowing green slime that smells distinctly of cloves.

There’s an entire Age of marshy water, with trees that grow so high that they blot out the sun, and so large around that you could hollow out a single trunk and comfortably create a home for a family of six. It was an entire civilization living in the treetops, now abandoned. He spent a particularly long time there, once he overcame his fear of heights; there was a voyeuristic thrill in walking through opulent manors and humble shacks alike, of seeing how people lived, what they treasured, who they were. He found haunting sketches of men and women and children, their cheekbones narrow and sharp, their eyes as large as an infant’s even into adulthood. They had a written language, whoever they were, but he’s never been able to decipher it.

In the world of the blind, the sighted man is king. In a world of complete, eternal silence, he is simultaneously everything and nothing at all.

Countless books and all of the scholars disappeared forever, but there were Ages which had not been affected by the cataclysm, and their libraries often remained intact. He seeks out these libraries in every world he visits, starved for a connection to another human being, relishing in the discovery of handwriting that is not his own.

More questions arise. Are Ages actually constructed by the will and imagination of the Writer, or do they already exist, just one of a literally infinite number of possible worlds, and the act of Writing simply opens a door?

He doesn’t know. No one does; it’s the question that haunted Writers for generations, caused ideological rifts and acts of violence. Thousands of Writers before him had failed to answer it, and he sure isn’t going to find out now. The originators of the Art believed that the universe was made of probabilities, and that each Age was the result of a combination of probabilities—a single branch on an infinite tree. This is, perhaps, why each Age can only be written once.

Losing track of time and space doesn’t mean that he’s permanently adrift. He has a few home worlds, comfortable places that are stable and well-Written, created long ago by masters who knew how to create Ages that would never decay. He has a place to sleep, food to eat, and books—thousands and thousands of them. He can’t even imagine what it was like before, when libraries spanned across Ages and Writers could create tens or hundreds of thousands of books, maybe more. Even then, he knows, they didn’t even make a dent in what was possible. That’s the beauty and the terror of infinity.

He’s unable to measure himself by days or years, but he knows he’s grown and changed. When he began to Write, he struggled, the way all fawns do when taking their first few shaky steps. He was ambitious at first, but his Ages often collapsed before he could even try to visit; there were more than a few close calls, when his hand was a centimeter from touching the linking panel but the itch in his brain said _stop,_ and the book crumbled just as he pulled away. Humbled, he instead began to read, to visit the established Ages and try to decode how the words on the page became air and water and land. He could not copy a Descriptive book exactly, which was both a boon and a burden for his education. An Age can only ever have one Descriptive Book, and no more; attempting to create an identical book will result in a different Age, one which is usually more unstable. Descriptive Books can be altered, though, so instead he began to try little tiny things: changing the colour of the leaves of a particular species of tree, for instance, or making a cliff face precisely five degrees steeper. On one especially daring occasion he made it rain diamonds instead of water; he still has a pockmark scar on his forearm from where one of the stones hit him as he scrambled to safety. By the time it calmed, the storm had buried an entire village in gems ankle-deep.

He didn’t feel too bad about it for too long. There was no one else who could be hurt by the storm; the property he damaged would never be claimed or mourned.

As time went on, he got bolder. He began to play around with objects, creating a woolen blanket here, a birdhouse there. He got more ambitious, once trying to Write a sailing ship he could use to explore around an ocean planet which intrigued him. He had made a mistake somewhere, and his beautiful ship ended up fused with a large stone which jutted out just beyond the coastline. It was far from seaworthy, but it made a wonderful temporary home once he built a dock to reach it.

He got bored eventually. He always does.

Nowadays he’s better at Writing. He knows how to create things that are stable, and only occasionally slips up. His mistakes now result in bizarre rock fissures which emanate impossible colours, rather than a planet shaped like a dome, and he can usually fix them without too much trouble. He leaves Linking Books wherever he goes, a habit which began as a way for him to get home but continued as a ritual, a path of crumbs, a marker that Victor Nikiforov was here once. That _anyone_ was here once. Now and then he rediscovers old Linking Books in his own scrawling hand, the only sign that he’s already visited that particular Age. After so many, they begin to blur together.

He sometimes thinks of settling down, of picking one place with a good library as his home and turning each visit to a new Age as a retrieval mission to consolidate as many books as he can into one place. It would be useful, to be sure; there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to remember which Age held the Descriptive Book for a place he wants to revisit. It’s always reassuring to have a comfortable space called home, and as the only Writer left he has the opportunity to gather the books into a single, awe-inspiring place that would dwarf the Library of Alexandria many times over. But something holds him back, and it’s not just wanderlust or boredom.

It’s hope, and he loathes it.

He leaves the trail of Linking Books, he keeps things largely in place, and he returns back to certain Ages again and again, keeping half an eye out for something different.

But if he’s honest, universes contained within universes makes for a confusing path; in the end, it’s freeing to just let go of intention or aim or direction and just wind his way through whatever Age catches his interest. And that’s what he’s done for an indeterminable amount of time, searching for nothing at all. He’s visited places and learned their secrets, furthering his craft. He has Written worlds that literally brought his dreams to life; he has swum in crystal clear lakes and created electrical coils that merged seamlessly with pulsating, flesh-like plants. He’s fallen asleep in hammocks suspended above glittering oceans, rocked gently by winds that sound like echoing voices. He’s seen animals he can only describe in the vaguest of terms, like trying to explain a dream: whale-bird hybrids. A giraffe with real gold flecks on its skin. A lizard with functioning, five-fingered hands, opposable thumbs and all. He’s seen a million miracles, except for another human being.

One evening Victor links into one of the regular Ages he frequents, an island once inhabited by a famous Writer family before some trouble with the sons caused them to abandon it. It’s stable and idyllic, in its own haunted way, and he knows that before the drama and the cataclysm it was popular enough that there are several Linking Books scattered throughout the universe to get him back there. He’s looking forward to a bath and a night in the most familiar bed he has; as he enters the library, shaking silver dust from his boots, he pushes his bangs out of his eyes and stops dead in his tracks.

_No. It can’t be._

Someone— _someone_ —has pinned a piece of paper on top of a painting of the island. Victor comes closer, creeping slowly, the colour draining from his face. His fingers tremble so hard he almost tears the paper as he pulls it down from the wall.

It’s a scrap from his desk, the standard cream stock he’s always used. And there, in a delicate clean hand he’s never seen before, are four words: _my name is Yuuri._

Victor drops the paper, and it floats down to rest on his feet as he sways in place.

He’s not alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi friends! Please enjoy this new chapter. I intended to update this much sooner than I did, but, well. Life is chaos sometimes. This fic has been a bit of a training ground on a shorter pacing style that I really want to try out, so I had to drag myself kicking and screaming into that reality, but I am tremendously happy with the result. I hope you are, too.

_No. No no no no no._

Victor feels the blood drain from his face and he backs away from the little scrap of paper as if it’s a venomous snake. Even from five steps away he can still make out the words: _my name is Yuuri_.

Victor has spent so many nights fantasizing about what he’d do if he ever found someone else. He’s rehearsed countless sentences conveying emotions ranging from curiosity to joy, but right now all he feels is terror.

A gust of wind at his back. The library door is still open.

Victor sprints outside to the wooden slab walkway, standing at the center point of the island. Nothing else seems different; the statues around the reflecting pool are still in place; the marker switches he can see are all still deployed properly. He runs towards the observation chamber, tripping over an errant slab and nearly crashing to the ground, but he finds the door securely locked. He scrambles down the walkway towards the shore, but there isn’t even a footprint in the dirt.

 _Is he still here somewhere?_ Victor goes back to the front of the library, whipping around again and again, trying to look everywhere at once and seeing nothing but a blur as his eyes desperately seek something new. He goes past the reflecting pool to the entrance to the Age full of trees; it’s locked. He makes his way down to another building he rarely visits, heart racing; everything is still shut tightly, just as he left it.

Victor is breathing heavily and covered in sweat when he arrives back at the library after a feverish hour-long search. When he first settled here he collected all of the Linking and Descriptive Books into the library, so the stranger—Yuuri—is either hiding somewhere on the island or he used one of the books to transport elsewhere. Victor’s initial search hasn’t entirely ruled out the former, but the locking mechanisms on the buildings are all rather fiendish to tamper with unless you know what you’re doing. Now, holding the scrap of paper in one hand, he scans the room he perhaps knows best. If this Yuuri did Link out of this Age, something would be out of place in the library; the book Yuuri used would be open, on a table or on the floor. That’s the way it goes.

 _There._ Tucked in the shadows, half-hidden by the fireplace stones, he can see the corner of a book lying open on the floor. Victor drops to his knees and pulls the book out into the light, hands shaking so hard that he’s afraid he’ll rip the pages. He intends to flip through the book, to read its contents properly and discern which Age it links to and what he might find there, but Victor’s hand moves independently of his brain and lands hard on the swirling Linking panel, sending a puff of dust flying into the air. He doesn’t even register what he’s done until he starts to feel the inexorable sensation of being pulled towards the page, and of reality starting to blur around the edges of his vision.

 _No. No!_ He tries to scream, but his mouth has dissolved, is falling into another universe, is disappearing here and reappearing there. The library swims and slips away into nothingness, and Victor is falling with the sound of reality whooshing past his ears—a warped, dizzying noise that registers halfway between visceral and mechanical.

And then he’s reaching out towards a bookshelf that isn’t there anymore, and he clamps his hand over his mouth to keep from crying out. Normally the Linking process is bearable, once you’re used to the idea, but this time it feels violent and sudden, and the shock of it knocks Victor to his knees, hitting soft moss instead of finely polished wood.

He’s in a meadow, surrounded by imposing shadowy pillars which must surely be trees, but he’s feeling lightheaded and dizzy and can’t clearly see. Victor closes his eyes and tries to separate his panic from the sense of disorientation that inevitably comes with traveling from one universe to another in a fraction of an instant. His heart pounds in his chest, each beat reverberating all the way down to his fingertips.

As his vision clears, Victor realizes that the shadows above him are not the trunks of trees but rather huge columns of grey concrete, leaning against each other as if in pain. In between are piles of crumbled stone, with some larger pieces intact enough to reveal the shape of a window here, the corner of a doorway there. Everything is covered to some degree in bright green spongy moss. The skeletons of buildings, Victor realizes. They once must have loomed tall over this place, but something—the cataclysm, some other apocalypse, or mere decay—destroyed them a very long time ago. In some places, the rough edges of broken rock and twisted metal stick out like a broken bone; in others, the moss has grown thick, creating a blanket that transforms the straight lines and corners into soft and irregular mounds—nature reclaiming nurture.

Victor looks up; pale blue sky, bright yellow sun. No large moon suspended in the sky, no binary star system to cast conflicting shadows—just a sun and a sky, like millions of others. He shields his eyes and watches something that might be a bird fly overhead.

He has absolutely no idea where he is.

More than that, he has no Linking Book back to the island; normally, depending on the excursion, he brings at least one, possibly more for good measure. So unless he finds a library here, or at least some paper and ink, then he’s stuck.

The thought makes his stomach drop. Victor has done a lot of really stupid and reckless things over the years; with no one around to discipline him (and therefore no one around to disobey in the first place), he’s gotten himself into a few nearly disastrous scrapes, but he’s always emerged triumphant, returning back to the island or one of his other regular haunts with little more than a new scar or a brilliant story that he can’t tell anyone. He’s never, ever gotten stuck somewhere that he couldn’t escape.

His heart pounds against his ribs, and it seems to thud in syllables: _my name is Yuuri._

Far in the distance, nearly at the edge of the horizon, there are shapes that look a little like intact buildings. With a heavy sigh, Victor tucks the slip of paper into the inner pocket of his shirt, and begins to walk.

 

The Art is ancient and powerful, and like all ancient and powerful things it has a spotty history. Some holes are filled with apocryphal tales and stretched truths, and others are just blank voids—points in time for which there are no records or answers, just a _before_ and an _after_.

(The cataclysm is surely the largest of these voids, and the most recent. Victor hasn’t decided how he’ll write that part of history yet.)

Being a Writer is a strange thing. It takes years of rigorous training under at least one master Writer, starting with an intensive study of the history of the Art, then reading and analyzing as many Descriptive books as possible, and then—slowly, tentatively, terrifyingly—learning to Write, first by modifying existing Ages, then eventually creating something new. The first time you step foot into an Age you’ve Written, and see the pieces of your imagination lying there before your eyes, it’s all too easy to mistake yourself for a god. The very best Writers were those who remained aware of the possibility of harm, choosing to create beauty in ways that were small, joyful, and humble. The worst Writers found godhood appealing, and throughout the history of the Art there had been more than a few men—and it was almost always men—who had visited unspeakable horrors on the Ages they’d Written and the beings inside it.

You cannot Write animals of any kind, including humans, and this fact has by turns wracked Victor with feelings of both anger and relief. There have been days, and especially nights, when he’s desperately wished that he could create a human to keep him company, but the ramifications of such an act would drive him completely mad.

He shouldn’t be able to do something like that. No one should.

There are two types of books: Descriptive Books, and Linking Books. The Descriptive Book is the unique tome in which an Age is written, and there can only ever be one Descriptive Book for each Age. Scholars have tried to copy Descriptive Books down to the letter and ink type, but the result was always a separate world, similar to the first but different enough that there could be no mistaking the original for the copy. Descriptive Books can be altered, with details erased and rewritten, but this can cause instability. Linking Books, by contrast, are much quicker to write, and serve the brilliantly simple purpose of Linking into an Age that’s been written. While there can only ever be one Descriptive Book for each Age, there can be an infinite number of Linking Books into that same Age, and it is these which are used for regular travel purposes. If Victor cannot find a Linking Book back to somewhere familiar, he can at least write a new one if he really needs to—but he needs to find _something_ , or else he’s trapped.

The sky is huge and flawless above him, wide open and clear blue, but he feels like he’s in a box with walls that are steadily closing in.

He walks for hours, maybe a day, before he reaches the buildings—including, blessedly, a library. Victor falls to his knees in front of the bookshelf, and he pulls every Linking Book he can reach off the shelf in a flurry, flipping them open and tossing them aside in a truly atrociously rude manner until he sees the name of his island inscribed inside and nearly passes out from relief.

But as the panicked thudding of his pulse begins to slow, Victor’s hand slows and hovers above the Linking panel that would take him home. His eyes begin roaming over books he’s never seen before, his imagination sparking itself at the thought of all the new places he could possibly visit. For months, Victor has been chasing that old thrill of adventure, fearing it gone entirely; now it’s back, and he can’t even appreciate it, because every spine taunts him: _My name is Yuuri. My name is Yuuri._

He can’t go home. Not when that scrap of paper is still tucked in his shirt pocket, sitting just half an inch to the left of his heart.

That’s when he sees an opened Linking Book sitting on a bench—and a piece of paper just underneath it. Victor’s pulse quickens again; he approaches the bench with extreme caution, tiptoeing, afraid to disturb even a single mote of dust.

 _Don’t stop running,_ this note says; the writing is sloppier, a little smudged at the end, but when Victor holds up his scrap of paper it becomes obvious that they were penned by the same hand.

Yuuri.

This time, Victor is careful. He picks up the Linking Book and flips through it, sagging with relief as he sees the name—Aridanu. A familiar place, with water and food he knows he can eat. He Links away without a second thought, his home island forgotten in the rush of thrill at the thought of finally, _finally_ , meeting another human being. How could he have been so terrified of the thing he’s wanted for longer than he can remember?

When he appears in Aridanu’s library, Victor has a smile on his face, looking around for the stranger—but he’s alone. Again. Still.

_Oh._

He sits down heavily on a chair, and his chest feels so strange—empty, hollow, _pulling_ at him. It hurts in a way that’s very different from the hunger pangs in his stomach. Victor takes note of his surroundings: there is an open Linking Book on the table, the same as in the previous library, but there’s no note. Victor has no idea if Yuuri actually left this Age, or if he’s still here and trying to throw Victor off the trail.

His chest stabs at him so badly that he gasps, doubling over. The exhaustion of the past days hits with swift and brutal force, and he finds that he’s hungrier than he even thought possible, along with the deeper crushing tension in his heart. It’s not until he’s eaten some apples from a nearby tree that Victor realizes what’s happening to him:

For the first time in recent memory, he is desperately, actively, and achingly lonely.

 

Victor raids Aridanu for supplies before he leaves; he takes a bag, and fills it with paper, ink, and quills, as well as the fruits and nuts he can eat and a Linking Book back to his island. Then he tracks Yuuri through two more Ages, following whatever opened Linking Book seems like the right path, and when he finally sees another note he collapses onto a chair with relief that he hasn’t lost the trail.

_My name is Yuuri. I have no home. I am no one._

The spike of emotion causes Victor to crush this note into a ball before he realizes it, and in a panic he spreads it back out, smoothing it as best he can, every swipe of his palm gentler and gentler as if across the stranger’s face. “I’m sorry,” he finds himself whispering.

He Links to the next Age. He finds the next Book Yuuri used, and follows him. Over and over, as a handful of times become a dozen. He finds notes more often than not, most of the time just the words _my name is Yuuri_ , written over and over like an incantation. He starts to wonder if they’re going in circles.

 _My name is Victor,_ he writes on torn bits of paper, tucked into the cracks of a stone wall and between the pages of Linking books, over and over again, in every place he can think of, just in case.

 _Please come back,_ he begs in his dreams, tossing and turning with the little scrap of paper clenched in one hand.

 _You've gone crazy,_ he tells himself as he turns a huge mountain range into bright purple quartz crystals in a fit of frustration.

 _You were never sane,_ he realizes as he violently scribbles a whole species of fruit out of existence.

_My name is Yuuri. My name is Yuuri. My name is Yuuri. My name is—_

 

In one Age, maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth they’ve been through, Yuuri leaves a full sheet of paper beside the next Linking Book, the creamy off-white of the stock making his eight written words seem even more stark: _The cataclysm_ _will destroy everything. Never stop running._

Victor’s never needed to be told that twice.

He loses count of the number of times he has to deal with the dizzying feeling of Linking to a new world.

The notes begin to get longer, more confessional, as if Yuuri is trying to bait him to follow. The handwriting gets messier, too, the once-neat curves devolving into off-center loops.

_I had a family. I don’t know where they are anymore, but I had a sister named Mari and a mother named Hiroko and a father named Toshiya. They were on Riven the last time I spoke to them. I don’t know if they were still there when it fell._

Victor can’t remember his family. Maybe he can, but he’s blocked it out; he knows he had one at some point, and if he stretches his memory he gets faint hints of a bratty younger brother, and a gruff father with a shiny bald head. But they disappear before he can see them fully in his mind, evaporating like wisps of smoke.

 _I had a family_ , Yuuri wrote. Victor bites his lip and sits back against the cool stone of the building he’s camped in for the night. He watches this Age’s double moons rise with silent majesty, hanging bright silver and gold in the wine-coloured sky. He wonders if Yuuri and his family traveled a lot; maybe they saw this moonrise once. He wonders what they looked like—what Yuuri looks like.

He finds the answer five Ages later, in another library, with another piece of paper that’s even messier than the last.

_I have black hair and brown eyes. My glasses were made by my father, every year I needed them._

When Victor dreams, he sees black hair and brown eyes and glasses, and he cries out but is never, ever heard.

He works as quickly as he can, faster than he’s ever gone before, flitting from Age to Age, following Yuuri’s trail. The letters get more and more shaky, the writing occasionally illegible, as if Yuuri’s running from something. _Maybe he’s running from you_ , whispers the doubting voice in Victor’s mind.

 _Impossible_ , he scoffs to himself, even as the thought chills him to his core. _Yuuri wrote to me. He told me his name. He’s left me notes. He has to know I’m following him._

But why? To what end? The progression they’ve made hasn’t followed any real logic. Yuuri has led them from Mechanical Ages to Natural Ages and back again, from famous hubs of commerce and knowledge to barren planets with nothing but a room hollowed out in the ground, where Linking Books lay scattered every which way. There never seems to be a pattern, except for the fact of running, of chase, of following.

_My name is Yuuri. I’m afraid._

_My name is Yuuri. I am no one._

_My name is Yuuri. The ending can never be written._

Victor loses track of time again.

 

He finally finds the stranger in the Eder-Tsogal Age, a stunningly beautiful garden that spans a whole planet. He sprints through the tall grass, blades tickling his shins through his trousers, and—there. _There_. Across the field, there’s a shadow undeniably shaped like a human being.

Victor has hallucinated people plenty of times. This shape is real, solid and weighted, the sunlight dappling across his back as he passes under a tree’s leaves.

Victor opens his mouth to call out, but his throat closes and chokes off his voice, and a sudden surge of anxiety grips him so rapidly that it brings him to a skidding halt. But the figure is still moving, just about to disappear from view into a copse of trees, so Victor pushes his feet forward until walking seems normal again. He picks up the pace, his hands slick from sweat, his mouth bone dry. He can’t quiet his footsteps, but the figure doesn’t seem to notice them, never once stopping or appearing to look back. It’s also moving slowly, enough that Victor finds he’s actually catching up.

“Yuuri!” Victor croaks, clearing his throat to try again. When was the last time he spoke out loud to something that could hear him? “A-are you Yuuri?”

The stranger—Yuuri—turns slowly, one hand gripping the bag slung across his shoulder so tightly that his knuckles are white. He looks at Victor, his brown eyes glassy and unreadable.

Victor takes another step forward, until he’s nearly close enough to touch. His fingers twitch with the urge, the want, the need.

Yuuri sways unevenly on his feet, and his mouth curves up into the tiniest smile. “Oh,” he says softly, his voice like a song. He reaches a trembling, pale hand toward Victor. “Oh. Hello.”

And then his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses onto the grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on Tumblr at [iwritevictuuri.tumblr.com](http://iwritevictuuri.tumblr.com), so please come say hi! 
> 
> If you enjoyed the chapter, I hope you'll let me know! ^_^
> 
> EDIT! Megsotaku has drawn [gorgeous art](http://megsotaku.tumblr.com/post/167518466541/poppies-orginal-by-claude-monet-edge-of-a) of the last scene of this chapter in the style of Monet. Please go look at it and shower them with the praise they deserve because it's stunning and I love it <3 <3 <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello readers! Thank you for your patience with this fic.  
> Last week I sat down and actually outlined the story down to a very granular level, and I'm tremendously excited by the result. It's a story I'm immensely proud of and passionate about, and I hope you'll like it too. <3 Also, the incredibly talented dommi made a [mood board](http://sinkingorswimming.tumblr.com/post/167435998775/victor-has-spent-so-many-nights-fantasizing-about) and I'm overwhelmingly in love with it!!
> 
> So without further ado here is another chapter of ~~the Lonely God Victor torturing hour~~ this fic.  
>  (It's absolutely the Lonely God Victor torturing hour, let's be real)

 The moments immediately following Yuuri’s collapse stretch out to infinity, and each heartbeat echoing in Victor’s ears seems like the mark of an epoch passing by. He half-expects Yuuri to dissolve, to be naught but dust and desperate imagination, but after five pulsing heartbeats he’s still there, his body carving a simulacrum in the tall grass.

_Oh._

Victor kneels beside Yuuri, relieved to find him still breathing. Then he pulls a Linking Book from his bag and gently drops it onto the grass, flipping it open to the Linking panel. This Book was Written to transport a traveler directly to the middle of the first floor of the library on his island; Victor can see it rotating silently in the panel, inviting him back to one of the most familiar places he knows.

Beside him, Yuuri draws in a pitched and struggling breath. Victor turns, the blood rushing through his ears as he reaches out for Yuuri’s face, tentatively brushing the sweat-soaked hair away from his forehead. His skin is hot with fever.

Under Victor’s palm, Yuuri exhales a near-whisper of a moan. He’s definitely feverish; even with the heat of the Eder-Tsogal sun, Victor can see the telltale blanched tone of his skin, the sheen of sweat, the slight tremble of a shiver. He thinks of the notes Yuuri left, and their increasingly erratic handwriting.

 _How long?_ he wonders, watching Yuuri’s labored breaths. _How long have you been sick? What made you this way? What happened to you?_

Victor’s eyes flick back to the Linking Book, his hand already reaching into his own bag to grope for ink and a quill. He flips past the Linking panel, to the Writing which describes the Book’s destination, and scratches out the word _library,_ replacing it with _bedroom, on top of the bed, in the center of the mattress, facing due East._

It’s the best he can do on short notice, but everything else about the library is impeccably described, so it should be enough. He hopes it’s enough.

Victor maneuvers the Book until it’s easy to pick up Yuuri’s feather-light hand and gently press his palm onto the page. Yuuri begins to dissolve almost immediately, and Victor swallows the wave of nauseous terror at the sight and focuses instead on following, pushing his hand to the Linking panel as soon as Yuuri fades away, and letting Eder-Tsogal swim and shatter into a million tiny round particles at the periphery of his vision.

He reappears, still kneeling, on top of his own bed. Yuuri is once again sprawled before him, thankfully none the worse for wear, and almost perfectly situated on one side of the mattress with a pillow beneath his head. Victor’s plan worked perfectly; they’re exactly where they need to be, almost down to an inch. Last-minute changes of Linking location aren’t generally a good idea—generally it’s best to modify a Book with careful thought and at least some time for a grammar review—but this is so much easier than if they’d Linked into the library and Victor had to carry a dead weight up those rickety stairs.

He squeezes his eyes shut. _Don’t think about the word dead_.

Now, in the calm and quiet of his bedroom, Victor feels his heart stop racing, and he opens his eyes and takes the opportunity to consciously _look_ at Yuuri for the very first time. The need to take in every detail is overwhelming, a desire that can only be described as hunger: the tone of Yuuri’s skin, with small beads of sweat shining lightly gold in the light from the sun outside the window; his long, thin fingers; the elegant curve of his neck; the black-rimmed glasses still perched on his nose, magnifying long black eyelashes; the fullness of his lips, currently cracked and dry.

Victor reaches over, hands moving slowly through air that seems impossibly viscous, and gently lifts the glasses off of Yuuri’s face. He has to reach over Yuuri’s torso to place them on the side table, as he does so Victor feels his heart plunge to his toes the same way it would if he were reaching over an endless chasm. The glasses make a tiny _click_ on the table’s surface.

Yuuri’s eyes suddenly fly open and he gasps, hands scrambling, finding and grabbing fistfuls of Victor’s shirt. Victor catches himself before he completely falls on top of Yuuri, but now his hands are on either side of Yuuri’s head, their bodies very nearly pressed together, too close, _so_ close—

Victor pulls himself free from Yuuri’s grasp and falls back, almost toppling off the bed, fear clawing with long fingers up his throat.

“No,” Yuuri rasps, clenching after him and missing, hands grasping at the air. “I...I can’t...” his voice breaks into a ragged whisper, his breathing becoming increasingly rapid and panicked, and Victor can see he’s trembling with the effort to keep his eyes open.

Victor doesn’t remember his mother. He doesn’t remember being sick as a child; he doesn’t remember what she would have done, if she ever existed (she _had_ to have existed at some point, though). He doesn’t know what to do. He creeps forward again, back into Yuuri’s line of sight, body moving of its own volition, his mind half a step behind and completely paralyzed by a dozen horrible emotions he can’t bring himself to name.

Yuuri’s eyes finally appear to focus, and Victor can’t help but think that they’re the most beautiful colour he’s ever seen. Then he loses every thought, because Yuuri reaches out and touches Victor’s face, sweeping his fingertips across the skin before shakily cupping Victor’s cheek in his hand.

Everything stops.

Victor has to push through the urge to stay like this forever, to capture this moment endlessly in time, to hoard it somewhere safe and curl around it like a dragon—possessive of the most precious possible things. Yuuri’s hand is clammy and his fingers are trembling, but Victor reaches up and lays his hand over Yuuri’s own, leaning into the touch, his chest suddenly tight.

Yuuri’s eyes flick back and forth across Victor’s face. “W-who are—”

“—Victor,” he whispers, his own name an unfamiliar shape in his mouth. “I’m—Victor.”

Yuuri’s face cracks as if he’s about to start crying, but the tears never come. “Victor,” he echoes softly. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t—I couldn’t stop—I need to...” his eyes fall shut, and he forces them back open. “I—”

“Sleep,” Victor hears himself murmur back. “You can sleep.”

Yuuri’s eyes are already shut again, and his hand goes limp against Victor’s cheek, his little finger brushing lightly over Victor’s lips as it falls.

Something takes over in Victor’s mind—something calm, caring, and capable, which severs him from the emotions he knows he should be feeling and leaves him only able to move with purpose. He straightens, sliding off of the other side of the bed, and comes around to unbucle the strap of Yuuri’s bag and ease it out from beneath his back. Then he pulls the blankets up to Yuuri’s chin, and after a moment’s thought he puts the bag on the side table by Yuuri’s glasses, just in case. Whatever’s inside is clearly important, and he doesn’t want Yuuri to wake up and think it’s been stolen.

 _Please wake up, Yuuri._ _Please_ _._ It begins as a simple request but some part of Victor realizes that it’s a supplication of the most desperate kind.

It’s tempting to stay here forever and watch Yuuri sleep, but something tiny is crawling at the walls of Victor’s chest, growing with each passing second, clamoring with a quiet but steady need to get out. Still, he stands by the door for a long time, hand hovering over the knob, unable to tear his eyes away from Yuuri’s steadily moving chest. He thinks _up, down, up, down_ in an endless incantation, matching his own breath to the rhythm. Once, twice, half a dozen times Victor thinks of pivoting on his heel and turning the knob and pulling the door open, but he never moves; he just keeps breathing, keeps watching, until he’s imagined every possible permutation of turning his back on Yuuri’s quiet death.

At some point he blinks, and in that fraction of a second he finds that he’s already a few steps into the hallway, his feet moving of their own accord. Victor floats down the stairs and out into the main library, scarcely aware of his footsteps; but the floorboards creak in the same way they always have, and for the first time in recent memory Victor thinks of the word _home._ The calm and collected demeanor he’s been wearing begins to crack at the seams, and he stretches out of it like an insect shedding its skin, breathing into this new larger space—suddenly free, and suddenly vulnerable, like a raw and open wound.

His heart begins to ache.

He goes outside to the wooden slab walkway and turns a sharp left, to the planetarium next door to the library. Victor hasn’t gone inside in a while, but the key code is burned into his muscle memory, and he pushes open the heavy wooden door with only a little effort. The planetarium is a single round room with a domed ceiling; a reclining chair sits in the middle, surrounded by equipment through which it’s possible to observe star field projections at exact dates and times. Victor used it once or twice when he first came to the island, but hasn’t bothered with it since; there’s not much point in watching simulated stars when you can just Link to a random Age and see an entirely new sky any time you’d like. But now Victor flicks the switch on the wall, plunging the room into complete darkness, and he lets the ceiling fill up with projected starlight, which builds slowly to become a holographic image that consumes the entire room, until the silhouette of the chair and equipment are the only things breaking the illusion of being completely immersed in stars.

Victor has dreamed about the star fissure over and over, and he’s never stopped being afraid of it, but the planetarium is safe and contained, and the island itself is stable. The beauty of the cosmos is not at fault for the folly of the men who let the world rip itself apart, and the perverse sense of comfort he feels at the projected grandeur around him seems somehow apropos. Surrounded by the soft glow of a galaxy that may or may not be his own, Victor slides down the wall, hugging his knees to his chest, and finally exhales with a shudder that wracks his whole body and leaves him feeling off-kilter, as if a very large spider just crawled across his skin.

Yuuri. _Yuuri_ . He mouths the name again, stretching out the long _u_ sound, letting his tongue flip elegantly across the _r,_ letting the final _i_ lift away as lightly as a hummingbird taking flight.

Yuuri is real. He’s real, and sick, and he’s probably going to die before Victor can ask even one of the hundred thousand questions that clamor at the tip of his tongue. He himself hasn’t been sick in—well, possibly ever, though that can’t be right. He does have some memory of what it’s like to cough, to sniff, to feel a cool hand laid reassuringly across his forehead; he just can’t remember the details, so there’s only a scrap of muscle memory interwoven with a million different threads of wishful thinking. But either way, Victor doesn’t have medicine here, and he’s stark terrified of the idea of Linking elsewhere to find some, lest Yuuri die in his absence—or, worse, lest he recover fully and just _leave_.

His cheek burns with the phantom shape of Yuuri’s hand. The stars around him begin to twinkle in silence, and Victor isn’t sure why—that’s not part of the planetarium’s programming—until he feels the first tear slip down his cheek and beneath the collar of his shirt. A dam breaks somewhere inside his head; he buries his head in his arms and sobs, loud and ugly, his whole body shaking, a howling lament punctuated only by desperate gasps for air. He’s unable to remember the last time he cried.

There are so many things you stop doing when there’s no one around to hear them. That old adage about a tree falling in the forest is—

Victor stops, his cries cut off by a sudden rush of clarity. He raises his head and looks up at the swirling stars around him, eyes narrowing in thought as the cogs in his mind begin to turn.

Trees. Trees provide leaves, bark, fruit—all things that can have curative properties, depending on the species. He doesn’t know exactly which elements are required off the top of his head, but the nice thing about this island is that it has a fairly extensive library, and the nice thing about a library is that it tends to hold answers to most of the questions you may have.

Somewhere in that library, in hundreds of pages of meticulously crafted prose, there has to be something that can help Yuuri.

 

The people who created (or discovered) the Art had particular views on the nature of the universe. For them, the universe was a great tree of possibilities with an infinite number of branches, each of which ended at a possible Age. All was uncertain until observed, and that uncertainty meant that every possible hypothetical was simply one pair of dumb human eyes away from becoming reality. The Art is, at its core, an act of observation—ironically one which runs in reverse, with the descriptions written before the actual sight is beheld.

In theory, all Ages are possible; in practice, there are certain limitations. Some things are fundamentally incompatible with the larger rules of physics, chemistry, and sanity; creating an Age with a flat disc-shaped planet, for instance, has rarely gone well, nor has attempting to Write a world that has the same density as your average neutron star. Some things are incompatible with human life; an Age with an atmosphere of gaseous Technetium is technically possible, and potentially capable of hosting its own ecosystem, but would be an instant death sentence for any human trying to Link in for a visit. An interesting Writing exercise, but not the sort of place you’d want to raise your children.

Outside of the outright impossible, instabilities can be more subtle, and indeed this is where the Art of Writing is the most dangerous. Writing Ages requires a huge amount of concentration and attention to detail, and even a small mistake can have unforeseen effects on the finished Age. Complicating things is the fact that an Age can be changed even after it’s been Written; after all, nothing is ever truly certain. Alterations are possible, of all shapes and sizes, but changing an existing Book is where a Writer is most likely to run into trouble, because they have to stay within the boundaries of what’s already been penned. Changing a Linking Book is fairly simple; it’s difficult to screw up too badly, because all you’ll do is Link yourself into the middle of a boulder in the worst case scenario. You’ll be dead, but the Age will trundle along, none the worse for wear. But in Descriptive Books, it’s the tiny contradictions—quirks of grammar or a swap of syllables—which are the most alarming of all; at best they’ll cause bizarre but lovable mistakes, such as Victor’s failed boat experiment, but at worst they can crack the very foundation of reality. A perfectly lovely Age can shake apart at the seams if someone interferes the wrong way, literally falling into itself and disappearing without a trace, plunging into the void. Descriptive Books are fiercely guarded for this very reason; they are the only way to create an Age, but they are also one pen stroke away from potential disaster. Victor is, at this point, a master of changing Ages to suit his whims; but now, for the first time in years, he’s finds himself worrying about the process. So despite his urge to jump into work immediately, Victor decides to research. Heavily.

Once he settles on his rough plan of attack, Victor carries ten books up the stairs to the bedroom and then goes back for ten more, stacked in his arms so high that he can just barely rest his chin on the top. He deposits them in a pile beside a ratty wicker chair that’s always served as a makeshift clothesline until now; then he sits, feet propped on the very edge of the bed on the far side from where Yuuri is sleeping. Victor keeps his lamp light low, only barely enough to illuminate the page in his hand, and every so often he looks up and raises the light to cast its humble glow on Yuuri’s face, waiting with a pounding heart until he sees Yuuri’s chest move.

Victor works this way, keeping furtive watch, for a countless number of hours. He flips through Book after Book, researching every possible plant he can think of, noting down which features have certain properties and how and why they grow. His lamp runs out of fuel twice, and he leaves the room only to refill it and to quickly eat an apple when the growling of his stomach becomes too distracting. His eyelids begin to grow heavy, but he pushes through it, reading until the words begin to swim and then going for another few pages until they make no sense at all.

He doesn’t recall nodding off, but he snaps awake to find himself slouched in the chair, a Book still in one hand and a nasty crick in his neck. The bedroom is pitch black; the lamp has long burned itself out, and the moonless night sky blends seamlessly into the darkness of the walls around him.

_Yuuri._

Victor drops the Book and crawls onto the mattress as lightly as he can, reaching out with trembling fingers into the darkness, and flinching when he finds Yuuri’s own hand resting on the quilt. He traces the curve of Yuuri’s wrist before pulling away, suddenly consumed with dark thoughts.

_Please wake up, Yuuri._

_It would be fitting,_ the thoughts whisper, _for Yuuri to die in the night._ It would make the most sense for him to leave Victor’s world just as swiftly as he arrived, to bring no answers and raise more questions than could ever possibly be contemplated. To be such a swift anomaly that there would be no choice but to act as if he’d never been there at all. For Victor to bury him in a corner of the island, for the grave to become a patch of grass that Victor pointedly ignores for the rest of his life. It would be right, in a horrifying sort of way, for things to return to the way they’d always been—for Victor to be alone.

Tears spring forth and drip down his cheeks, and Victor gasps out as a wave of emotion slams into him. He feels disoriented, completely lost, as if the components of his being have been violently disassembled and slammed back together in a jumble. Nothing makes sense. He can’t seem to stop crying.

Yuuri’s fingers twitch as he shifts in his sleep, and Victor hears him inhale—and mumble something.

Victor wipes his face with his sleeve and shifts a little closer, straining until he finally hears Yuuri breathe _in, out._ He listens intently, wondering if he imagined it, but then—

“Eraeos...”

Victor blinks into the dark, and shifts a tiny bit more, lying by Yuuri’s side, close enough that he could wrap his arm across Yuuri’s chest. He rests his head on the very edge of Yuuri’s pillow.

“What did you say?” he whispers, so faintly that he can barely hear himself, but yet Yuuri seems to stir.

“Eraeos,” he mumbles again, a little louder this time, his voice unmistakably edged with sorrow. “Eraeos, it...I...s’gone...”

Victor mouths it, committing the word to memory. _Eraeos._ His fingers creep over to lie next to Yuuri’s, a millimeter apart, prickling with proximity unfulfilled.

He lies still, listening to Yuuri breathe, until the early dawn light begins to turn the inky black of the room into an ashy grey. It’s only then that he tears himself away from the bed to splash some water on his face and change into a new shirt. Victor returns to the room to grab his scribbled notes, squinting at them as he pads down the stairs.

An antipyretic to relieve the fever, an analgesic to help soothe pain, gingerols to settle the stomach. The enzymes which produce these effects are all produced in different ways; some are produced in the rhizome of flowering plants, others are best plucked from the bark of a deciduous tree. Victor taps his index finger against his lips as he thinks; this is going to be one of the more difficult Writing projects he’s ever attempted, and it isn’t even a full Age. But unlike the Ages he’s Written by virtue of his whims, this has to work, and it has to work perfectly.

Victor walks outside, squinting as the light hits his eyes. It’s still early, and the sun is hovering low in the sky, piercing its way between the buildings and trees on the opposite side of the island and turning the reflecting pool a brilliant shade of gold.

It’s all so beautiful, so serene, so stable, so safe. This island hasn’t been touched since it was first Written; its simple layout has withstood the test of time and the ravages of entropy, and if everything goes according to the plan that’s formed inside Victor’s head then this Age will never be this perfect again.

With his heart in his throat, Victor returns inside and goes to his writing desk, clearing off a few abandoned dishes and some half-scrawled bits of paper left over from the last time he Wrote. He catches a glimpse of a few phrases as he cleans: _Single tree stump in the middle of an endless ocean. Self-luminous red sky? Non-Newtonian fluid lakes._ Victor crumples the pages up and tosses them into the fireplace to be used as future kindling without a second thought; all he can think about is the task at hand. To that end, Victor retrieves his tools, laying them out on the writing desk just so: his notes, some ink, three quills—and a very specific Descriptive Book.

He opens the cover, flipping past the Linking panel to where the foliage is described. With his mouth set in a thin line, Victor scratches out a lengthy description of one of the large oak trees, obliterating the words until they’re just a mess of scribbled ink.

The ground shakes beneath his feet, rattling the desk and nearly spilling Victor’s ink pot all over the page. He catches it just in time, his heart racing at the near miss, and when he goes to set the pot down at the far edge of the desk he finds his hands are shaking badly enough that he has to stop, pushing his chair back with a squeak and stumbling towards the doorway as his stomach twists with fear.

Victor sits down on the white marble steps, turning his quill over and over in his hands. He thinks of Yuuri, upstairs in bed, whispering through his fevered haze. Yuuri, who said Victor’s name out loud, who looked into his eyes and apologized, as if he could possibly be at fault for _anything_. His existence is miraculous.

There were once whole schools full of Masters who specialized in Writing Ages that were each a single puzzle, with intricate moving parts that came together in perfect harmony, designed with impeccable precision. Victor’s never been patient enough to do that sort of thing; he’s spent his years chasing adventure and novelty, but he’s never built something nearly as complicated as what he’s about to do.

 _That’s a lie_ , he bristles to himself as he rubs a smudge of ink out of his palm. _You’ve done some incredibly impressive Writing._

Victor isn’t a humble man. He’s honed his craft until it’s become second nature; there’s been literally nothing else to do with his time except to study and Write and improve his skills. He’s conjured trees from scratch while still drunk on wine he Wrote into existence to be spectacularly inxoticating; he’s created huge palms which blotted out the moon and sunflowers with clear resin at their centers which could be used as natural telescopes. He’s Written everything and nothing and back to everything again, so many times that he’s lost count. That isn’t what’s making him nervous.

The sun hits his eyes, more directly this time.

_It’s just never mattered before._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](iwritevictuuri.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](www.twitter.com/iwritevictuuri), so come say hi! I love chatting with people about stuff. 
> 
> If you liked the chapter, please consider letting me know! I love your feedback.


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